Michael Carey

MICHAEL CAREY

Poor begin to raise voices in outrage

Peter De Vries, who wrote for The New Yorker, said reality is what won't go away no matter how hard you try to make it go away. For Americans in 2012, what won't go away is the growing income disparity between rich and poor and the decline in American social mobility.

MICHAEL CAREY

Dancers' wage fight anything but exotic

It had been a tough day for Jennifer Prater, but Jennifer, pale and tired, looked like she had known other tough days. A small, thirty-something redhead, Jennifer is one of three plaintiffs in a wages-and-hours lawsuit she and two other dancers, strippers, filed against their former employers in federal court. They are asking for $324,000 in back pay and other compensation.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Just in time for Christmas, letters of youth

This Christmas, I am doing something different for gifts. Some gifts, anyway. I have a suitcase of letters from my college years and the years immediately after, the mid and late '60s. I am sending them back to the people who wrote them -- when I can.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

What winter?

The front-page story about the 52 year-old man who survived three days on a diet of frozen beer after his pickup became stuck in a snow bank near Nome attracted national attention. Oh those wacky Alaskans who eat beer like C-rations! But this isn't a beer story: It's a driving story.

MICHAEL CAREY

Final trip with dad to trapping cabin a son's treasure

Snow fell lightly from a leaden sky and began to accumulate in front of my house. Winter had come to Anchorage. But in my imagination, I was atop a cut bank along Carey Lake, south of Lake Minchumina, where my dad had a trapping cabin, a high-school kid alongside Fabian peering into the gloaming on a gray afternoon almost 50 years ago.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Sowing Wall Street

While in Manhattan recently, I visited Occupy Wall Street. The demo has become a major tourist attraction and is located within easy walking distance of the World Trade Center Memorial, the New York Stock Exchange and Trinity Church (where founder Alexander Hamilton lies buried).

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Big and bold

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is not running for president. That will please the pundits who called him fat and penned gags about the extra-large governor weighing in on the issues and demanding massive budget cuts.

MICHAEL CAREY

Power tools, country tunes and do-rags highlight funeral

A while back, I visited Fairbanks, my home town. The morning I left for the Golden Heart City, I was leafing through the Daily News when I saw an obituary for a 43-year-old Fairbanks construction worker. I didn't know him but recognized his name. I know his father and decided I should pay my respects by attending the funeral.

MICHAEL CAREY

More than the post office may disappear

The U.S. Post Office is dying a lingering death. Although a white-hair, I probably will live long enough to attend the wake and share my grief with the mourners.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Ghost of Ithaca

Before long, I will fly to New York to talk to students at the college where I earned a history degree in the 1960s. I am going to talk about Alaska -- writing about Alaska history.

MICHAEL CAREY

Old papers, documents tell engaging tale of two Alaskans

"Here, look these over" my friend Karen said. "These" were a couple dozen Fairbanks newspapers from 1907 in a cardboard box. Karen had purchased the papers when they came up for sale in Fairbanks a few days earlier.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Philosophy's gift

Some colleges and universities have dismantled their philosophy departments. Ours is a practical age, and practicality argues for accounting, logistics and hotel management, not philosophy.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Political giants

Former Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield died while I was in Portland recently. The press coverage was voluminous -- rivaling that of Ted Stevens.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Talk of the cabin

When my parents lived at Lake Minchumina in the Forties, they received The New Yorker.

MICHAEL CAREY

Super Cub a super carrier for dad, son

As a kid, I did a lot of flying with my Dad. He owned a Super Cub. In the '50s and '60s, an Alaskan with a Super Cub was a prince of the air, free to explore the territory far from the limited road system.

Coincidental neighbors take divergent paths in life

The New York Times recently carried the obituary of Hughette Clark, age 104.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Check out the riot

Gil Scott Heron, who died recently, may have been right when he said "The revolution will not be televised." But it's definitely going to be on the web -- just like the Vancouver riot.

MICHAEL CAREY

Recalling home of human imagination

I was visiting Fairbanks. An old friend, who has lived in the Midwest since the Sixties, was visiting too. We hooked up for an afternoon.

ALASKA NOTEBOOK

Awake with age

"Years do not make sages. They make only old men." So sayeth a New England almanac of yesteryear as quoted by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.

MICHAEL CAREY

Photos of the dead

Should President Obama have released photographs of the body of Osama Bin Laden? Make up your own mind.

MICHAEL CAREY

The making of Bill Weimar

Bill Weimar's name has been in Alaska newspapers for 40 years, longer than all but a handful of living Alaskans. During the FBI investigation of political corruption, he was in the papers regularly. In 2008, he made headlines when he pled guilty to illegal campaign contributions and was briefly jailed.